I would like to know how much effort is involved in translating from
one language to another. The measure of effort is based on the effort
required to do the original writing. Thus if a person takes 1,000
hours to write a novel how long would it take an equally competent
person to translate that novel. I am after some statistics that relate
the effort to create the original product to the effort to create the
translation

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Request for Question Clarification by bananarchy-ga on 12 Dec 2002 09:13 PST

Do you have a specific language in mind?  It's generally easier to
move from one European language to another than it is to translate
Mandarin Chinese to Swedish, for instance.  If you could give some
language parameters, that would help to be more exact in an answer.

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Clarification of Question by thiriperson-ga on 12 Dec 2002 11:48 PST

I am looking for order of magnitude effects. I know it will vary and
it will vary between different languages and between different topics
and between different authors and translators. It would be interesting
to know the variation caused by different languages as well as
different subject matter but for my purposes it doesn't really matter
if it is not exact. I tried to make it broad because data may be
difficult to come by for different pairs of languages. It would be
most interesting - for example - to know how long it took someone to
translate Harry Potter into different languages.

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Clarification of Question by thiriperson-ga on 12 Dec 2002 20:43 PST

I am happy with that answer. What it is telling me is that translating
takes a little less time than the creation but can take longer. It is
certainly not an order of magnitude quicker to do a translation than
it is to do the original.

I am happy for your comments to be an answer if you would like to post
them that way.

Thanks,

Kevin Cox

That's an interesting question.  But there are so many variables
involved that it would be difficult to provide an answer that would be
applicable in all cases.  Some types of translation can be done almost
instantaneously (e.g., simultaneous translations given at the United
Nations), while others require committees that review and re-review
the work that has been done (such as translations of the Bible).

I am looking for the time involved in translating in comparison to the
original generation. In the case of United nations translations it is
1 to 1.

In the case of the bible we cannot know because we do not know how
long it took to write.

In the case of someone writing a given book we can know how long it
took and we can know how long it took someone to translate the book.
Is the translation typically about the same amount of time or is it
twice as long or is it 25% of the time?

I've done what I can, but I don't think I can find a number concrete
enough to answer your question satisfactorily.  There exist statistics
regarding how many words a translator can translate per hour or per
day, but these are generalized, and can vary depending on the
difficulty of the material in question.  As mvguy pointed out,
pedantic day-to-day communication is often given only cursory
translation, while there might be several translations of a book (Take
"Anna Karenina", for instance, whose two translations were fiercely
debated since even the PLOT was different in some cases) and thousands
of scholars in debate over the Bible.  I truly wish I could find you
the statistic you are looking for, but I don't think I can do so.

At various times, I've done and still do differents sorts of
translation, and the time I need varies enormously.  I speak in all
but one case of translating into my mother tongue, which is the
preferred scenario.  I have translated from Serbo-Croat, Slovenian,
Polish, Spanish, French and German into English.  The one exception is
with Esperanto, where I have translated both to and from English.

If it is easy text, for example ordinary fiction or a fairly simple
piece of non-fiction with no specialist terminology, I do it in
approximately 20 minutes per typed page, with one page being 350-450
words.  A more literary work, where I want to convey the nuances of
the language would take maybe double that time, and more if the author
used very obscure words needing a lot of look-ups.  Technical
translation, which in my case means medical and scientific
(biosciences and some chemistry), can take me one hour or even more
per page if it involves a discipline with which I am less familiar. 
In such cases, I can spend more time consulting dictionaries and
trawling the Net to identify unknown terms than actually translating.
Poetry is the most challenging of all.  I have only translated poetry
out of English into Esperanto, because Esperanto is the only language
in which I have written poetry.  My prime objective there is to
preserve the music of the original, and, in the case of poetry which
has metre and rhyme, to conserve those patterns as closely as
possible.  It has sometimes taken me months, thinking about it on and
off, to translate one short poem!